In wireless communication systems, the process of scheduling users for communication plays an important role for the overall performance. Scheduling is normally part of the general resource management, and typically involves allocating communication resources, such as the transmission resources of a shared radio medium, to users according to some priority order.
Scheduling is of outmost importance in many wireless applications and system environments such as the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) that supports user-to-user communication services. For example, real-time user-to-user multimedia telephony (MMTel) services play a key role to satisfy the needs of different services and to improve perceptual quality. When a lot of users enjoy the multimedia services concurrently, the available communication resources need to be allocated efficiently. This requires an efficient strategy and implementation for scheduling user access the communication resources.